Spatial language: Meaning, use, and lexical choice

Kristen Johannes, WestEd

Barbara Landau, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

Spatial language accounts aim to address both the meaning and
usage patterns of spatial terms across diverse cases, but do not always clearly
distinguish these from one another. Focusing on the prepositions in and on, we
set out to disentangle spatial language meaning from use by comparing judgments
on a series of linguistic tasks designed to tap each aspect of spatial language.
We demonstrate that judgments of truth-conditional meaning and patterns of use
show different distributional signatures: judgments of meaning give rise to a
more uniform distribution than use patterns. We explore another judgment: lexical
choice, and propose that choice is a key factor in shaping the distribution of
spatial expression use. Our analyses reveal that patterns of choice judgments
correlate with the patterns of expression use in spatial descriptions for the
same spatial scenes, supporting a model of spatial language that differs from
traditional accounts of meaning and categorization.